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The Royal Ballet for years offered headphones with audio descriptions so that blind patrons could follow the action on stage. Now, in a revolutionary production, the whole crowd will experience such descriptions within a piece that investigates how blindness can redefine our responses to experience, audio and storytelling.

Blind Creator Collaborates with Celebrated Choreographers

The blind artist, a blind artist, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, alongside other dance creators, and composer Max Richter in creating a fresh Royal Ballet work that will debut on November 12th, World Ballet Day, as declared on Thursday.

Within her creative practice, Healey is motivated by a desire to demonstrate how blindness and disability can present an different type of awareness for all people. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, woven with the composition, forms the center of the show on stage.

"Producing exceptional dance and musical theater for everyone" is a mission statement of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's leader, the troupe is focusing on "total access – inviting performers and audiences to experience dance in life-changing fresh approaches," he explained.

Several Choreographers Work on New Production

The fresh production is being choreographed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as Wayne McGregor, all partnering with Healey.

Robert Binet, the director of this production, stated: "World Ballet Day was founded on the idea of inclusion. After a ten years, we're pushing that idea more to consider how disabled perspectives can mold our art form, and welcome audiences of all abilities and histories to encounter dance in fresh approaches."

After collaborating with Healey in Canada and Australia, the curator realized that those with vision who had heard the artist's descriptive audio believed it assisted them grasp ballet, which can seem so unclear.

Touching Collaboration Between Professional and Amateur Performers

In a particular dance piece, the company's performer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been visually impaired since birth and who had always thought that ballet was "mostly for individuals with vision". But the dancer has understood that it in fact "involves a lot of feeling and emotions" and activates faculties, "sight-based and non-visual".

The dancer's personal story of once getting lost on his way home and relying on the sunlight to direct his way back had motivated a performance in which the professional dancer embodies the "warm breath of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they move together," Malcomson stated.

"This occurred mid-afternoon and I had a intuition that the sunlight should be shining from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I couldn't see the light itself, I could sense the temperature … So I kept walking to the western direction …. It directed me home. The sun was a great assistant to me. The sunlight could be a good metaphor. So the tale emerged from there."

Blindness Presents Unique Relationship with Movement

Healey, an assistant professor of disability studies at the Toronto university, stated: "Visual impairment and lacking sight fosters a dynamic relationship with movement in a way that is comparable to a expert performer's relationship with their physical self and dance."

In collaborating with the dancers, she was seeking to communicate what "they feel in their body, something that’s just not perceivable through sight," she explained. "I speak with the dancers to get a feeling of how they are in their physical self, where their respiration is, what they consider, how their body are sensing.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] attire, stage lights, set and music designers, the viewpoints and artistry of blindness are ever present as we, blind and sighted persons, develop a rapport through our affection of movement and performance. It is this innovation and love that I try to integrate into the spoken commentary. It is a partnership of the senses directed by visual impairment."

She continued: "While the sight of the dance, the gorgeous spectacle, is available facing the patrons, there is so much that they’re not accessing or understanding, and it is visual impairment that is welcoming sighted and visually impaired patrons alike into the hidden. What I wish is that, when patrons exit, they sense ballet in a different way, and they’re also feeling the presence, and hearing the understandings of, visual impairment in fresh and vibrant ways."

Composer The Composer on Audio Narration

Richter, whose recordings have accumulated more than billions of online plays, commented the audio descriptions established a relationship between blindness and sight "by means of a musical landscape, offering narration to that which remains unseen". He noted: "It is not merely a description of a show. It is the performance itself."

International Ballet Day Collaborators

The company's international collaborators for International Ballet Day comprise the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The companies will also offer entry to behind-the-scenes video, rehearsals and recently created pieces – broadcast in real-time via online channels.